SCIENTISTS studying the North Sea have found the remnants of a lost landscape, complete with human settlements, under up to 450ft of water.

They have mapped lakes, hills, salt marshes, coastlines and rivers, all now covered in water and silt but which were once the homes and hunting grounds of early modern humans.

It was inundated more than 5,000 years ago as the ice melted after the last ice age, raising sea levels at a rate that some scientists say will now happen again because of climate change.

“What is emerging from our research is a prehistoric landscape larger than Britain itself,” said Professor Vince Gaffney of the Institute of Archeology and Antiquity at Birmingham University, who led the research.

He will reveal details of his findings at the British Association’s Festival of Science in York next week. He will describe how his mapping project has found the remains of a great lake, known as the Outer Silver Pit, lying 100 miles east of what is now the mouth of the River Humber in Yorkshire. The lake drained what were then the greatest rivers in northern Europe, including the precursors of the Ouse, the Tweed and the Elbe.

Just to the east of the lake lay the rolling Dogger Hills - now submerged but which have become the foundations for the notorious Dogger Bank sandbank. They also inspired the archeologists’ name for the lost landscape: Doggerland.

Such features emerged from seismic data collected by oil companies hunting reserves of oil and gas in the North Sea.

Gaffney and his colleagues realised that although the surveys had been designed to study rock strata hundreds or thousands of feet below the seabed, the same data could be used to look at the upper layers too.

“The coasts, rivers, marshes and hills we found were, for thousands of years, parts of a landscape that would have been familiar to hundreds of thousands of people and countless species of animals,” said Gaffney. “Now it is all gone.”

The BA Festival of Science runs from September 9-15 with public talks by leading scientists and engineers. Visit www.the-ba.net/ festivalofscience or call the box office on 01904 433 281

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